Vendors smack Thunderbolt punters with massive pricing markup
Bit rich
SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
There's expensive and then there's Thunderbolt device pricing... and that will make you gulp.
WD has just announced it is shipping its My Book Thunderbolt Duo, a dual hard drive fitted with Intel's Thunderbolt interface. Jody Bradshaw, WD's general manager for consumer storage solutions, said; "Its dual Thunderbolt ports provide amazing creative flexibility while allowing daisy-chaining of up to six My Book Thunderbolt Duo drives or other high performance peripherals for fast and efficient workflow."
WD quotes speeds of up to 10Gbit/s, twice USB 3.0's 5Gbit/s and blowing USB 2.0's 480Mbit/s completely away. But you will pay for the speed. The new My Books cost €599.00 for the 4TB version and €699.00 for the 6TB gear. The dollar price is the same as the euro price, by the way.
A My Book Studio II 6TB external desktop hard drive costs $429 online. You are paying $270 for the Thunderbolt speed premium.
It's not just WD that is pricing up Thunderbolt... At Apple's flagship Regent Street store in London a 1TB LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt product will cost you £349.95, and the Thunderbolt cable will cost you £39 more. A LaCie 1TB Little Big Disk with FireWire 800, USB 3 and eSATA will set you back only £212.
The Thunderbolt speed premium costs you £138 on top of the hard drive, a 65 per cent uplift in LaCie's case. With WD it's a 63 per cent uplift, but our pricing didn't include the cable. Guess I'll be Thunderbolt-less until prices come down. ®
COMMENTS
Depends
Depends quite a lot what your doing with it.
We do publishing, which involves a lot of versions of 500Mb text files, and lots of uncompressed TIFF images at ridiculously high resolution (15k x 10k) (Which they have to be for professional level printing)
The raw data for one version of one 200 page publication can easilly be 10Gb. Couple of versions of one publication?
Then there are also back-end metadata databases, with redundancy. Websites, feeds to website, archives, Development resources including source control, Development servers, et al.
When you've got XSLT transforms and programs running on a 1Gb XML file, you really want it to be streaming to and from the fastest disks possible. For most large processes, the disk is pretty much always the limiting factor.
Dead on arrival
extortion level pricing
almost Mac exclusive
23456
"The dollar price is the same as the euro price, by the way."
So, they're using Apple's retail calculator, then.
Still, it costs more to do business in the UK as Steve said.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
